Palaces of Light (13 page)

Murphy sniffed. “Yeah…’cept we’re not really trailing her, are we? It’s the other kids, too, though you wouldn’t think any of us had fucking kids except him. And it ain’t even them, is it? It’s the fucking outlanders… .”

Taggart shot him a sideways glance. Like Murphy, he had felt that it was some kind of a slight that the baron hadn’t let them go after their own, but had taken advantage of outlanders with some kind of chilling background. If a man was so inclined, he could take it as a slight on his own abilities. K had explained it to them like this: why waste your own men on a vanguard action when you could send in outlanders you didn’t give a fuck about? They could take the brunt of whatever the enemy had to throw at them, and then all your own men had to do was to mop up after and bring home the prize.

Taggart could understand that. Maybe you could still call it a slight on your own ability, but you could also call it a damn fine piece of tactics. There was always risk, but if you kept it to the minimum, then that was okay by him.

But he figured that Murphy didn’t see it that way. The big man took it more personally because he had a kid of his own among the ones who had been spirited away by the weirdos. Taggart didn’t have kids, so it didn’t hit him that way, though he had enough of an imagination to put himself in that position. For Murphy it was more a matter of a man taking back his own. More than that, if there was going to be any risk to the kids on getting them back, he wanted to be the one who took those chances and assessed that risk. Not leave it to some outlander.

So that made him kind of jumpy. And complain like fuck, of course… Taggart was starting to get really pissed at the complaining, as it never seemed to stop. For that reason alone, if for nothing else, he hoped they reached the end of the line soon.

It was a wish he shouldn’t have made.

Trailing the one-eyed man and his people hadn’t been that easy. They had kept the original party in view from a great distance once they had gained ground. In the same way, Murphy had kept his own men at a similar distance. It was obvious that the mercenaries were shit hot, and would soon know if they had people on their tail. But at the same time, they had to keep some kind of eyeball on them. Now and again they were slipping over the horizon, and it felt like they were coming dangerously close to losing touch with them.

And then, when that seemed to be happening, they would come into view again and Murphy would have to halt his party while the outlanders seemed to just wander around in circles like they were doing something really weird and unexplainable before starting to move forward again, causing Murphy to let them get out of sight again.

Those weird moments when they seemed to be just moving in circles just doing weird shit sent a shiver down Taggart’s spine as he watched them through the binoculars he had slung around his neck. These were his prized possession, won in a firefight years before, and Murphy knew better than to ask to use them. But sometimes Taggart had wanted to hand them over as he found himself at a loss to explain what the hell was going on. There seemed to be no reason why the outlanders were acting in such a strange manner, and yet there was something about it that he couldn’t explain that somehow chilled him to the marrow. It was like they were doing real shit—stuff that was for real—but there was actually nothing there for them to be doing it to… Hell, it was so hard to explain, especially without coming across as some kind of stupe or crazie, that he kept quiet about any ideas he may have about what could be going on. Something to do with the way that they had all been weirded out back in the ville, but he couldn’t explain it, so he opted to say nothing and look like a crazie himself.

Now the outlanders had moved out of sight but not over the horizon. Instead, it was as though they had suddenly dropped down into the earth. It was pretty obvious that they had found something like a crack in the earth, and had gone down on the tail of the weirdos and the kids.

It was time for the sec force to catch up to them. Accordingly, Murphy had gotten his boys to pick up their pace as they followed. Like the two groups they were pursuing, they were on foot. They carried emergency rations to lighten the load, but still it was a bastard of a trek into lands that they wouldn’t otherwise traverse even with pack horses or wags. The heat and the hard rock beneath their feet took their toll, even at the pace they had previously set. Now it was faster, and they felt more and more drained. Frustration and exhaustion chipped at their patience, making them determined to get this action over and done with as soon as possible.

It made them edgy and blunted their caution. None of them apart from Taggart had paused to ask why the one-eyed man’s people had stopped to act so strangely. Now that they were in even more of a rush to make up the ground, they were ill-prepared for what was about to happen to them.

They weren’t to know that those who had gone before had experienced the anomalies of sudden canyons or rock walls springing up in front of them. They weren’t to know as these forms of psychic defense weren’t to be practiced on them. Instead, the intelligence that defended the mysterious palaces of light from all interlopers reached into the psyches of the men now approaching and took a different path, one that was, nonetheless, equally as terrible to the approaching sec men.

Perhaps it had intelligence able to assimilate the way in which it had been breached, or perhaps it just had a variety of mental games that it randomly selected. The intent was, in truth, irrelevant. It was only the result that mattered.

As they trudged closer to their goal, it seemed as though the very ground in front of them started to rise up and form a barrier. Bizarrely, as they found themselves instinctively shifting their balance for an upheaval that didn’t come, it seemed that the earth crumbled and split asunder, re-forming without any tremor to indicate the vast forces that had to be causing such a schism. The dirt spilled and spun through the air, and yet they weren’t covered with so much as the slightest film of dust. That alone should have struck them as weird, if not for the fact that they were dumbfounded by the suddenness of the action in front of them, and the way in which it seemed to cut off their path.

Murphy and Taggart exchanged bemused and fearful stares.

“What the fuck is that?” Murphy whispered.

Taggart had no words. He just shrugged as he looked along the length of the wall of rock that had sprung from nowhere with an uncanny and breathtaking speed. The barrier seemed to stretch as far as the eye could see in every direction. Somewhere at the back of his mind, connections were forming with some of the strange movements he had seen through his binoculars. Some of it had looked as though the mercenaries were attempting to climb something.

This? But why hadn’t he seen it then? He looked down at himself, brushing away dirt that wasn’t there. He smiled to himself.

“It ain’t real, that’s what it is,” he said cryptically as Murphy shot him a puzzled glance.

“You gone stupe or crazy?” the big sec man asked.

Taggart shook his head, almost imperceptibly. “Neither. Though mebbe that’s what someone or something wants me to be. All of us. Listen, how the fuck could that have come out of nowhere, with no dust to cover us? No fucking earth moving underfoot, either,” he added, stamping down to prove his point.

Murphy sniffed and looked at the men around them. They looked scared. He didn’t blame them much. He felt pretty much that way himself.

“Okay, so what is it, then?”

Taggart barked a short laugh. “Hell, don’t expect me to tell you what it is. I can only tell you what it ain’t. No dirt, too quick… It ain’t real. Look.”

Acting and sounding more fearless than he really was, Taggart stepped forward and punched the rock wall in front of them, not realizing that belief was the thing that powered the illusion. Even the slightest suspicion that it may have substance gave it so, a circular loop of logic that both sustained and powered the illusion.

And hurt his hand. Like hell. He yelled in sudden pain and anger as his fist appeared to strike rock. Despite the gravity of the situation, some of the men beside Murphy couldn’t stifle their laughter at Taggart’s cocksure confidence ending in such pain and humiliation.

He glared at them, spit in fury on the ground, then turned back to the rock wall.

“Blind NORAD, I know you ain’t really there,” he yelled in fury before aiming a petulant kick at the wall. His anger, and the certainty that the wall couldn’t really exist, drove any doubts from his mind—with the inevitable result that his foot passed easily into the seemingly solid edifice, creating a hole of emptiness around its passage.

He yelled again, this time in triumphant glee. “Ya see?” he shouted. “Not fucking there, man.”

He walked forward, waving his arms so that it opened up a large space of empty air around him as he entered the rock edifice.

“Shit—just some kind of…” Murphy trailed off, not really knowing himself how to describe what he was seeing.

“Doesn’t matter what it is. Just matters that we can walk right through it and carry on,” Taggart said with an almost smug air, surrounded by empty space that framed him in the wall and gave him an almost messianic aura. “C’mon…”

Murphy looked at the men around him. They looked bemused rather than scared at this point, and also seemed to be looking to him for a lead. He stared at Taggart. It seemed impossible, but it was there in front of him. Then he recalled the weird shit that had happened, and the way it had messed with all of their minds, when they were back at the ville, and suddenly he understood in a way that he couldn’t have put into words.

“Fuck ’em,” he muttered as much to himself as to the men gathered around him, and strode forward confidently into the wall. It parted around him, forming an empty space that felt strange and unreal, as though the air was sucked out and then blown back in as he moved into the space where the rock had stood moments before.

“C’mon.” He beckoned to his men. “We can’t let them get too far ahead of us. We need to see where they went down,” he urged, goading his men to life with a reminder of what they were supposed to be doing here.

The others followed. Their first steps were tentative, but as they neared the rock itself, and could see that nothing had happened to Murphy and Taggart, their confidence grew—so much so that as they all reached the rock wall it seemed to part and fall apart around them.

And then it was gone, almost as if it had never been.

“How d’you work that one out?” Murphy asked Taggart, relieved and also unable to hide his admiration.

The gaunt man grinned, unwilling to give away his secrets. He would hold this one to himself and use it to get the upper hand when they returned to the ville.

That was the second mistake he would make. And his last.

There was a shimmering of the air around them, and then it seemed as though the rock had re-formed around them. Except that it wasn’t solid, but rather seemed to be in a series of shifting and mutable shapes that moved at speed around their heads. The rock appeared to come alive and form into a series of faces and bodies that were fluid and yet awful, their twisted torsos and contorted, silently screaming faces staring sightlessly into the very souls of the men contained within the boundaries of their flight. The image seemed to move in repetitive and intricate patterns that formed a web within which they weren’t so much contained now as trapped. For that fraction of a second that each stared into the face of the other, it seemed that the imaginary faces—for what else could they be—were staring right into the souls of the sec party. Every fear and doubt rose bubbling and unbidden to the surface.

And then the first man opened his mouth to scream. As he did so, one of the chimera in flight took advantage of the fact, and darted down his throat. He tried to swallow and then found that he couldn’t. Choking, he doubled over and then, as his companions watched in a mute and horrified awe, he straightened and arched his back so that it seemed as though he might topple backward. But before he could do that, his chest split asunder in a spray of bone shards, pulped organs and a mist of blood forced from its previous resting place by a tremendous force. Only his spine, now raggedly exposed, along with the remains of his rib cage, kept him upright before the weight of his head and remaining shoulder tissue caused it to implode.

The shock of seeing that, and also of knowing that the force—whatever or whoever it might be—had the capacity to inflict physical damage if not real substance of its own was enough to make whatever resolve the remaining men had crumble to the dust that had failed to cover them moments before.

Each man screamed in fear. Murphy knew he would never see home again. The ville didn’t mean much to him, but his family did. The same was true for a couple of the others. For another two it meant that they would buy the farm, alone and unloved, in the middle of nowhere, with nothing and no one to mark their passing, or even their brief tenure in this world.

For Taggart, there was the bitter knowledge that he, and he alone, was responsible for their demise. If he hadn’t been so willing to score points with his little knowledge and the way in which he had used it; if he had been just a little more thoughtful about the consequences of any action that they might take, then he might not have opened them up to the force that was now invading their minds and—he was sure—actually making them cause this to happen to themselves.

It was too little realization, and way too late to make any difference. He could do nothing but acknowledge that fact as he felt his own insides rip themselves inside out as the cold flow of a chimera oozed down his throat.